British producer Burial is mostly known for his mysterious and ambient creations processing them through sampling and layering techniques. He is considered to be one of the masters of ‘hauntology’. A word used to describe music that has a specific familiar feeling and ambient of nostalgia with vintage found-sound montages incorporated within the music. When you listen to Burial’s iconic album ‘Untrue’ it almost makes you feel like walking in the empty and cold streets of a town that existed in the past, almost a ghost town now.
Throughout the whole album Burial cements vocal samples all over the tracks with pitching them up and down to create an eerie feeling. These samples are mostly from covers of already existing songs. The vocal samples are used in a way where they only resemble human voice now and it almost sounds like ghosts or past voices are talking to us through thick cold air or inside of our minds. This of course was a desired approach in Burial’s music which is all about eerie and sorrowful nostalgic future.
The synthesis in these tracks are really deep and mostly in minor scales. There always is a heavy and wet baseline underneath the tracks that carries beautiful pads and a prominent vinyl crack sound. This vinyl crack sound is interesting to me because its placed so carefully within the tracks. Sometimes it can be heard really loud, sometimes it’s deep down within the sound. The title track untrue opens with some samples that resembles door and feet walking to me. Which then proceeds to a nice breakbeat and vocal samples.
In an interview Kobe9 the owner and founder of Hyperdub record label which Burial releases with tells that the album samples a lot of TV shows, video game original soundtracks and loads of FX sounds. The track Ghost Hardware might be one of the examples of these. While most of these songs include singing vocal samples dominantly, this track in particular features a VoiceOver talking voice that splits the track to a little silence before the looping chords hit again.
When the album is listened over and over again from start to finish it definitely makes you feel like you have entered this world Burial created which does not exist in the real world. By using familiar sounds and samples Burial creates a creepy but hauntingly beautiful new world to us. It sounds familiar but it is actually not.
MacGregorreid, M. (2019) Hauntology; experienced through Burial’s ‘Untrue’. Available at: https://marymacgregorreid.wordpress.com/2019/04/26/hauntology-experienced-through-burials-untrue/comment-page-1/ (Accessed: 1 December 2022)